Transactions of the Korean Nuclear Society Virtual spring Meeting May 13-14, 2021 Development Status of Lead-bismuth-cooled Fast Reactor for Marine Application

This paper presents the core design for MicroURANUS which is a long-cycle lead-bismuthcooled fast reactor for marine applications. MicroURANUS can be deployed on floating power plants, merchant ships, or icebreakers in single reactor or clustered configurations. MicroURANUS evolved from the URANUS project with numerous modifications introduced to the core geometry, reactor materials, and operational characteristics to satisfy marine-propulsionspecific design objectives and constraints and to achieve long-cycle operation. The reference marine application is icebreaker propulsion with assumed hull life of 40 years and 75% capacity factor giving 30 effective full-power years (EFPYs) at 60 MWth nominal power. Most merchant ships are scrapped between 20 to 30 years of age dependent market conditions, so the icebreaker metrics bound the marine-propulsion application space. To de-risk the near-term deployment of MicroURANUS, uranium oxide fuel (UO2) was selected considering the mature operational base for UO2 in commercial light and heavy water reactors and some LMFRs and domestic fuel manufacturing infrastructure in Korea.